The Chinese Garden Read Free Page B

she attracted to herself those, like Rachel, who found her talk fascinating, and others who found it dangerous or amusing. Together, the previous term, she and Rachel had edited (and largely written) a magazine, in which poetry and parody, virulent comment on the Bampfield regime, and philosophizing on life in general, were welded into a whole by the brilliant editorial hand of Margaret. She was the only spirit among the girls to whom Rachel, blatantly anti-games and fervently intellectual, deferred, for Margaret, totally uninterested in all forms of sport, had forfeited the right to appear on the games field through stubbornly refusing to hit the ball if it reached her. She did this, notbecause she could not have played games well if she had given her mind to them, but from principle, and this increased the admiration the intellectual set felt for her. Rachel’s own case was different. She hated games because she could not play them, and for Rachel it was essential to do a thing well, otherwise it was a torment to her. She did not feel equal to emulating Margaret’s ruthless tactics and even – with the ambivalence that characterized her attitude towards Bampfield – made sporadic efforts to achieve something on the games field. But she was never at home with the athletic set, and rendered herself an object of distrust to them by ridiculing them whenever she felt her own inadequacy in their sphere. But in Margaret she recognized one whose chief delight, like her own, lay in intellectual pleasures, and she recognized also, with a certain envy, the consistency of character which she did not herself possess and had begun even then to desire. Rachel mocked incessantly at Bampfield, but secretly she loved it. She would have preferred to loathe it whole-heartedly as did Margaret, who frankly regarded it as a passage through purgatory. Rachel observed towards it a Catullan love-hatred of which she was sometimes ashamed. Once she had found Margaret brooding over a translation of Dante’s Inferno which she had discovered in the library, with illustrations by Doré. ‘Doré might have known Bampfield,’ Margaret had remarked bitterly, with that Byronic gloom which Rachel so much admired and to which she was by temperament as well as physiognomy quite insulted. She held the book open at one of the gruesome delineations of souls in torment. Rachel was merely amused. Her mind ran swiftly to parody. The book was a spur to her restless mind, perpetually seeking new material on which to exercise its growing muscles.
    â€˜Let’s write a new Inferno,’ she suggested. ‘ The Bampfield Inferno.’
    But Margaret at once shut the book secretively and refused to co-operate. Rachel saw her several times that winter, poring over the book in a corner of the library, dwelling with fascinated horror on the pictures of torment, and scanning the text for lines which confirmed her view of Bampfield, while Rachel, at a near-by table, would be translating the Aeneid with classical ardour, in the manner of Milton, or scribbling comic verses in the manner of C. S. Calverley. By this time the magazine was dead. Rachel would have continued it, but Margaret sucked the heart out of any enterprise quickly, and refused to embark on a second edition.
    Tonight Rachel was too tired to be provoked by Margaret’s secretiveness, desiring only to achieve in the setting of Bampfield the equilibrium which her birthday had disturbed. She was almost glad that Margaret had not told them the secret, for she could not have endured any more demands upon herself. In silence, drugged with heat, and the various and incommunicable emotions which weighed upon their hearts, the three left the darkened form-room.
    The corridors had long ago absorbed the cold of winter. Wainscot and gilded cornice and bare walls gave off a chill that enveloped them as they went up to bed. In silent files, girls were moving along to their dormitories. No